geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. [ticking] >> in october 2008, with the financial system on the verge of collapse, president george w. bush signed into law a rescue package in which american taxpayers bought up wall street's bad investments. the numbers were staggering, but they didn't begin to explain the greed and the incompetence that created the mess. as we first reported that same week, it all began with a terrible bet, one that was magnified by reckless borrowing, complex securities, and a vast unregulated shadow market worth nearly $60 trillion that had hid the risks until it was too late to do anything about them. it started out as a mortgage crisis. then it slowly evolved into a credit crisis. now it's something entirely different and much more serious. what kind of a crisis is it today? >> this is a full-blown financial storm and one that comes around perhaps one every 50 or 100 years. this is the real thing. >> jim grant is the editor of grant's interest rate observer and one of the country's foremost expe